More attendance = more attention for Ags
Ask any athletic director in the NCAA and they’ll tell you the name of the game is “exposure.”
Attendance numbers attract media coverage, which provides merchandising and sponsorship opportunities that generate revenue for the university’s athletic department. The department then uses the revenue for better recruiting, coaches and promotion – all of which will hopefully improve upon the attendance numbers the media find so attractive – and the cycle continues.
“[Attendance] shows that there’s interest in the team,” said Mike Strauss, Utah State director of athletics media relations. “Whatever product you have, if there’s interest there, television will pick up on that.”
So far this season, the Aggies’ men’s basketball team (17-1, 9-0) has brought in an average 7,453 fans per home contest, with their largest crowd of the year (10,381) coming last Saturday night against Long Beach State.
Despite having the best home draw in the Big West, with Pacific’s 3,440 coming in a distant second, and selling more than 4,000 of an available 5,000 tickets to the community, student attendance is down from previous years, a statistic ASUSU Athletics Vice President Tyler Olsen would like to see changed.
“Even with the crowd the other night [against Long Beach], there were still 1,000 to 2,000 seats that were available to students,” Olsen said. “Families came and sat in the section, but we really need to make that a true student section and fill the seats.”
Olsen has taken a grassroots approach to improving attendance with his Game Day shirts, and to date has sold more than 4,000 in the Cache Valley area.
“I love Utah State and I want other people to know how awesome it is,” Olsen said.
USU plays its home games in the Dee Glenn Smith Spectrum, the largest basketball facility in the Big West Conference. From a financial standpoint, however, the Aggies will need to see an increase in attendance to compete with the members of the Western Athletic Conference after USU moves to the WAC in 2005. The Spectrum’s capacity will rank in the bottom half of that league.
“Attendance will be crucial,” said USU Director of Athletics Rance Pugmire. “I think the name recognition of the opponents we’ll be playing will help that, but it’s going to be a tougher league.”
Pugmire expects that sales and contributions will go up once the Aggies move to the WAC and hopes that improved attendance will provide more sponsorship opportunities for the department. Still, not all financial needs will be met solely by sponsorships and other contributions.
“We’ll probably have some slight ticket [price] increases, because if we’re going to be a WAC program, we have to act like it,” Pugmire said. “We have to do some things salary and equipment-wise to get us on a level playing field with where the other [WAC] institutions are.”
Among all USU Athletics programs last year, men’s basketball was the only program to net a gain, according to reports filed under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, bringing in a surplus of $71,402.
Traditionally, men’s basketball, especially the NCAA tournament in March, has been the main source of funding for collegiate athletics. In the midst of an 11-year, $6 billion deal with CBS, the NCAA tournament paid out $130,697 to participating conferences for every game they played during the 2003 tournament, and the NCAA will increase the amount to more than $140,000 in 2004.
As a result, in 2003 the Big West Conference was the beneficiary of a reported $914,879 from the NCAA basketball fund, while the WAC received more than $4
million.
But Pugmire said those figures can be deceiving.
“We don’t make money when we go to the NCAA tournament,” Pugmire said. “We actually usually lose money. The NCAA covers your travel and that kind of stuff, but then they make you buy $14,000 worth of tickets, fly you to Greenville, S.C. and they wonder why you can’t sell them.”
Pugmire said that the newly implemented pod system, which places tournament teams in brackets that play closer to their homes, helps with ticket sales. Last year the Aggies played in Oklahoma City, in the same bracket as Kansas, Memphis and Oklahoma.
“We were able to sell most of our unused tickets and recoup some of that money,” Pugmire said. “We called up Kansas, Oklahoma and Memphis and asked them how many [tickets] they wanted. So we got a lot of new Big Blue members from those schools last year because we made them join before they could buy their tickets.”
With the university losing money, or, at best, breaking even, Pugmire said exposure is the greatest benefit of tournament play.
“The exposure is tremendous,” Pugmire said. “It helps with recruiting, fan excitement and anticipation for next year.”
Bill Steinbrecher, director of athletics at Valparaiso University, said his university saw “a large increase in the number of admissions inquiries” following Valpo’s Cinderella trip to the Sweet 16 in the 1998 tournament.
“The biggest benefit from the experience was one of branding,” Steinbrecher said. “Suddenly people became aware of this little Lutheran university in northwest Indiana and even learned how to pronounce ‘Valparaiso’ correctly.”
Valparaiso has been able to utilize the exposure gained from the ’98 tournament to create even more opportunities for national recognition, including scheduling games against Notre Dame and college basketball powerhouse Duke University in Chicago’s United Center.
“The branding experience at the national level was and continues to be of great importance to the university,” Steinbrecher said.
For Utah State, on a local level, television station KJZZ has picked up on the Aggies’ success this season and, in turn, picked up a three-game option that televised road games against Cal State Fullerton and UC Riverside, as well as the Aggies’ home game last Thursday night against UC Irvine.
“The exposure is great,” Strauss said. “The more people that see your product the better, especially with the success we’ve been having.”
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Aggie fans cheer on the men´s basketball team Saturday. The team will face conference foes Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara this weekend to defend their new Top 25 ranking. (Photo by John Zsiray)